Remi rolled his eyes. When he noticed they were all staring, he flushed. “As you were. I’ll let you know when I have what you want.”
The others turned back, dismissing Remi.
“Okay, so what do we do in the meantime?” Lennon asked.
“Is anyone else pushing this game?” Park asked suddenly. “Any of these influencers, I mean?”
All of them took their phones in hand, fingers flying as they attempted to answer. “There are thousands of accounts using the hashtag Chatterland Adventures,” Gift said. “This would take a hundred years to look at them all.”
“Jesus, how popular is this game?” Jay muttered, scrolling.
“What kind of videos are there?” Park asked.
“Mostly screenshots and play-throughs,” Gift said, frowning.
“Mostly?” Park questioned, looking at Gift.
“Yeah, mostly. But sometimes, there’s a picture of an empty lot, a parking garage, a house? Maybe they were tagged accidentally?”
“It’s hardly an accident kind of hashtag,” Persephone said.
Gift clicked on an image and showed Park. He squinted at the parking garage photo. He almost missed it—a flier the same dull gray as the cement was slapped to the outside of the building. Park wouldn’t have noticed it except whoever slapped it up onto the concrete wall had done so with black electrical tape. Still, the image blended so well it disappeared against the backdrop. But it was there. Something nobody would notice unless they were looking. A pixelated tornado-like shape.
“There’s definitely something shady about this,” Diego said.
“Check any picture you find that seemingly doesn’t belong,” Park instructed.
“Check it for what?” Morgan asked.
“For that pixelated tornado. Maybe it is how they find each other in the real world,” Park answered.
Jay shook his head. “How did the police not notice this? How could they just ignore something so random?”
Payton shrugged. “Laziness?”
“Didn’t you say this case made international news, Luca?” Diego asked.
Luca glanced up from his phone, nodding. “But only for, like, a minute. Apparently, the investigation went cold when the parents stopped cooperating, and when there’s nothing exciting to report, the reporters disappear.”
“Why would the parents stop cooperating? Could they have had something to do with it?” Gift asked.
Payton shrugged. “I mean, anything is possible I guess, but it seems unlikely, you know? Why would their seemingly pampered princess end up dead in a trailer park? There are far more…efficient ways to get rid of someone, as everyone in this room knows.”
Park had to agree with him. He wasn’t a parent, but he’d taken out enough people over the years to know that parents tended to show remorse after killing a child. There was no remorse in that crime scene. They hadn’t cleaned her up or covered her body. If a parent had done this, the crime scene would have shown some signs of hesitation. Besides, brutally stabbing someone to death was a crime of passion, not something a parent would normally do when deciding to end their child’s life. It didn’t make sense.
“Alright, Remi, you keep working on finding out what you can. Half of you look for any more influencers who might be pushing the game. Maybe there’s some kind of commonality. We’ll regroup tomorrow.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to be helping,” Payton said, voice deceptively innocent.
Park glowered at Payton, feeling like there was something deeper to his involvement with Kendrick’s visit. “Things change.”
Payton snickered, his gaze falling to Gift’s neck and the mottled bruises barely lightened by makeup. “They sure do.”
Gift arrived at the gym at six a.m., two hours before his first class, just as Aspen had asked. It was eerily silent. He chewed on his bottom lip as he prowled the large empty space. Was he early, or was Aspen late? He could have checked his phone, but it really didn’t matter. He would wait.
He dropped his bag with his towel and water bottle onto the risers, bouncing on the balls of his feet, just trying to burn off some nervous energy. Why was he so nervous? He couldn’t say, really. But his heart pounded with anticipation, like something was coming but he just didn’t know what. He couldn’t put a finger on the source of his anxiety, so he tried to walk it off. He had no reason to worry.
Aspen was an expert. And, more to the point, he was the only one who had offered Gift any help at all. Though, to be fair, for the last month or so, they’d cycled through weapons instructors like Hogwarts cycled through Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, with all the instructors picking up the slack while Mac and Archer had been gone. When they’d returned, Archer had been shifted to acquisitions.
